Authors

Discussion

The London Victory Parade of 1946 was staged for two purposes: to meet the expectation of the British people that a parade would take place, as it had in 1919, and to re-centre Britain and its Empire as a leading player in the defeat of Nazi Germany, at a time when the US and USSR were beginning to rewrite their own roles in the war.

The desirability of the event itself was fiercely debated at Cabinet-level: at a time when the Continent was smouldering, when parts of London lay in ruins, while British rationing continued and thousands of British servicemen remained overseas, it was not clear either that there was a clear victory to celebrate, or that British resources should be devoted to such an event.

There was certainly no great enthusiasm to include the Allies in an already expensive project: such invitations would entail diplomatic complications, as well as the practical considerations of lengthening the parade itself, and the requirement to provide accommodation and transport. The Foreign Office was not originally invited to the planning committee, though the soft power possibilities of the event led it to lobby successfully for invitations to be extended to Britain’s wartime allies.

In the event, different allies were accorded different levels of prestige : the ‘Big Four’ of the US, France, China and the USSR enjoyed top billing and were entitled to send contingents which were three times larger than those of the other Allies, who would march alphabetically to avoid diplomatic offence. The criteria of inclusion is of interest: not all those who had been formally allied were invited, while many neutral or sympathetic counties who had never signed a formal alliance were nevertheless included. Countries with Quisling governments were invited if their Resistance movements had been sufficiently stalwart, and if it was diplomatically desirable to do so.

Despite the final publicity and spectacle, however, it is one of the great ironies that while, on the one hand, the Victory Parade has passed almost entirely out of British cultural memory, on the other, it continues to resonate most among Poles, both within Poland and the wider Polish diaspora, when Polish representation was notably absent from the event. The narrative, of the Polish Armed Forces in the West having been betrayed by their British allies to court favour with Stalin, dominates popular history books and popular understanding of the event.

This paper intends to address a long-standing cultural reluctance to interrogate the event by exploring the significance of the Parade from three perspectives: the British, the London Poles and Warsaw – and to examine through a counter-factual lens the potential benefits which would have accrued to both groups of Poles had they chosen to take their place on the stage.